


it fills my head up and gets louder

by raedear



Series: it's such an almighty sound [4]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Consequences, M/M, Pre-Relationship, ill-advised sex, implied pining, it's a fun time for us all frankly, joe is both oblivious and in denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:35:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29963076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedear/pseuds/raedear
Summary: For every answer he gets, Joe finds more questions. Nicky faces the consequences of his choices.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: it's such an almighty sound [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2198991
Comments: 37
Kudos: 221





	it fills my head up and gets louder

**Author's Note:**

> please understand, i am flying as blindly here as you are
> 
> thank you [Tess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewalrus_said/pseuds/thewalrus_said) for rescuing this fic, and my sanity

Joe's first day back in post goes about as well as could be expected. He has a shouting match with Andy almost as soon as he walks in the door, and Nile looks at him like he was dropped on his head from a great height, but still. Surviving raising his voice at Andromache is a victory in itself. 

Sure, she rejects his demand to be returned immediately to fieldwork out of hand, but she at least gives him the dignity of finishing his sentence before she shuts him down. Nile doesn't even give him that. She doesn't even look at his requisition form for the return of his equipment before she stamps it with a bright red _no_. (Joe bitterly regrets the custom stamp kit he bought her for her birthday, but he has no one to blame but himself.)

He finds himself looking for Nicky on three separate occasions; he feels like he sees his eyes or the sweep of his shoulders around every corner. After the third time, he gives up the ghost and goes home. 

—

Joe still isn't sure exactly what happened between Nicky rescuing him and waking up the following morning. He remembers watching Nicky’s hands on the steering wheel. He knows Nicky brought him straight to headquarters. He remembers the bright infirmary lights and Andy's frowning face, but time stretches dreamlike and false between moments. He can't quite join the dots.

He remembers someone yelling, and Nicky's voice in response, quiet but terribly firm. He doesn't remember what was said. 

He remembers the sensation of someone's hand on his forehead again, gentle and soothing as he slipped into unconsciousness. 

Mostly though, he remembers pain. 

—

It takes two weeks for the medical staff to confirm him as concussion-free. They take longer with his fractured cheekbone and cracked ribs. 

It takes two surgeries to fully reconstruct his knee. 

He doesn't see Nicky for six months. 

— 

He pieces the story together, eventually. No one will give him a straight answer, but Nile looks at him with a certain brand of pity every time he asks. He figures the story out through old staff bulletins and rumour. 

He went missing. All undercover staff who’d been on missions with him in the year prior had been informed as a matter of course, in case their own missions were compromised. 

Despite being a continent away and about as far removed from Joe as it was possible to be, Nicky broke cover and came for him. From the whispers of the admin pool, he did it expressly against orders and without backup. 

(Joe thinks again about the rosary beads he saw swaying in the sunlight; about the car he didn’t recognise and how viciously Nicky cut through the building. He doesn’t think about gentle fingers brushing his hair out of his face. He dreams of grey eyes and pretends not to remember when he wakes up.) 

One thing he does know for sure: whatever Nicky did, it earned him a suspension and an official reprimand from Management. It doesn’t fit the image of Nicky in Joe’s head at all. Five years of exemplary work, never even _late_ , and Nicky put not only his own life, but his career, everything he’s been working towards, at risk for _him_. 

He takes two missions in the months before Nicky comes back, milk-runs he could do in his sleep, and he can’t stop worrying the question in his mind, like something caught between his teeth. 

—

Andy meets with him the day before Nicky’s suspension is lifted. She says nothing, but she stares at him with such a cutting look on her face that Joe feels laid bare in front of her. He wonders what she sees. 

‘Management wanted you separated.’ Joe suppresses the urge to flinch when she finally speaks, it feels so much like the snap of ice beneath his feet. 

‘Why?’ 

Andy’s the most effective, ruthless agent the Company has ever employed. Her exploits are completely secret and internationally feared. Joe can see why in the raising of her eyebrow alone. 

‘You tell me.’ He wishes he could. Andy doesn’t wait for an answer though, not really. She looks straight through him and talks to a point over his left ear. ‘I disagreed.’ 

You could tell Joe that wars begin and end on Andromache’s agreement and he’d believe you. 

‘What happens now?’ He can’t help but ask, even though he doesn’t expect her to be able to answer. 

‘Your knee is still bothering you.’ It isn’t a question, and he does Andy the courtesy of not bothering to lie. She’s right. His PT says he’ll get his full strength and range of motion back eventually. He’s just not reached _eventually_ yet. 

‘Yes.’

Andy stands without ceremony and frowns him into staying in his seat when he tries to rise with her. 

‘You’re on spotter duties until further notice.’

He gapes at her back as she leaves. He hasn’t been anyone’s _spotter_ since he was in training. He wasn’t suited for it then, he certainly isn’t suited for it now. He’s never been comfortable in a sniper’s nest, either behind or beside the gun. He’s always gone where the action is thickest, always been first on the scene and frequently the deepest undercover. They don’t even use spotters regularly, only for new hires and ops with blindspots. He can’t deny it irritates him, to be so sidelined by the actions of others. 

He grits his teeth though, and gets back to work. He’ll have no answers until he hears them from Nicky. 

(He chooses not to think about how Nicky has never spoken to him when it wasn’t relevant to the mission.)

( _The moon had been so lovely on his skin_ , whispers a voice in the back of Joe’s mind when he tries to sleep.)

—

There was little fanfare when Joe came back to work. There’s absolutely none when Nicky does.

Joe sees him through the windows of Andy’s office, and then again later heading for the firing range, and that’s it. Six months and the sum total of his interaction with the man who saved his life at the cost of his professional reputation. Nicky doesn’t see him at all. 

It bothers him, for reasons he can’t quite explain. He finds himself watching for Nicky in every spare moment. Their paths only crossed before in ops, but headquarters isn’t actually all that large. 

He sees Nicky leaving the gym, two weeks into his return. His compression shirt fits him like a second skin, and his damp hair curls where it meets his neck. Joe remembers the warmth and strength of his waist under his hands with a suddenness that almost shocks him. 

He shakes the sensation from his hands and turns away. There’s no reason he should be on Joe’s mind like this, even if he did save his life. Whatever this is, it’ll pass in time. He’s sure of it.

—

His orders come the way they always do. A file is left on his desk, the bare minimum of detail he needs to accomplish his mission, and a pre-filled requisition form. Unlike his usual ops, there are no meetings with the other agent to agree codes, no in-person brief, just a time and a set of coordinates. He’s been allocated a headset, a high-powered pair of binoculars, and a single pistol. 

He’s going to hold some baby agent’s hand while they do recon. He wants to be furious, it sits at the back of his tongue, bitter as smoke, but the lingering ache in his knee cuts it off before he can grow. As much as he wants to be back in the swing of things, he can’t be trusted. 

He grits his teeth and readies himself for his mission without complaint. 

— 

Unusually for a baby-agent, they’ve picked an excellent spot to nest. It takes Joe five minutes to enter the derelict hotel without being noticed, and he isn’t even sure it was the same entrance the mission lead used. He can’t see any evidence of them anywhere. 

Five storeys up, no uncovered entrances or exits, and he knows without seeing them that the sightlines will be perfect. He’s grudgingly impressed. 

Everything makes more sense when he finally makes it into the nest proper. He has to cut through a wrecked suite, climb a table, and lever himself up into the floor above through a crumbling hole in the ceiling, but there he is. 

Nicky di Genova, curled around the scope of a sniper like he was born to be there. He doesn’t even twitch as Joe enters the room, doesn’t acknowledge him at all, but Joe has no doubt he knows he’s there. 

For all his perfect stillness, there’s power in the long lengths of his body; coiled in the small of his back, the flex of his thighs where he’s braced against a ledge. His form around the rifle is textbook. Joe can’t help but let his eyes linger as he finds his way to his spot beside him. Nicky is a beautiful man. This isn’t news to him, but it strikes him differently somehow, to see him so completely in his element. 

Nicky finally deigns to look at him, only the tiniest glance, and Joe is gratified to see his eyes widen slightly in what he now thinks might be an unexpected tell of his. What it’s telling him, he isn’t sure yet, but he’ll figure it out. He smiles, warm as he can. For all their past animosity, Nicky put himself at great risk to save him. It’s the very least he can do, really. 

‘Fancy meeting you here.’ This time, Joe lets himself wink. Nicky’s eyes grow a touch wider still before he looks sharply back at his scope. 

‘I didn’t know you were back in the field.’ There’s that accent again. Still sharp as the edge of a blade, but Joe has questions, and he’s not about to let Nicky get to him before he gets answers. 

‘I could say the same about you. I thought suspension carried a six-month desk assignment.’ 

A muscle in Nicky’s jaw twitches.

‘Andromache felt it was unnecessary.’

That gives Joe pause, his smile slipping from his face. Andy may be a firebrand, but she takes disobedience seriously. 

‘Like she felt pulling you from an active op was unnecessary?’ 

Joe tells himself he’s reading Nicky’s body language when he can’t take his eyes off the muscles of his back. They tighten before he speaks, the broad stretch of his shoulders tense with something Joe can’t quite name. His mouth is unaccountably dry. 

‘She was not consulted on that decision.’ His voice is perfectly even, and his eye doesn’t stray from his scope, even though their intelligence tells them they have at least half a day before any targets could possibly be nearby.

‘Because Management chose not to, or because you did?’

Joe, because he actually is an exceptional agent, studies every face he sees and marks every distinctive motion. In the last five years, he’s picked up very few details about Nicky. One of them, however, is that Nicky blinks very slowly when he’s considering just how much information to give away. (He also blinks heavily after he laughs, but Joe has only seen that happen twice, and isn’t sure yet if it’s a coincidence or an actual trait.)

‘What Management chose to do is none of my concern.’ 

Making him speak is like drawing blood from a stone, but Joe has nowhere else to be. Nicky flexes his fingers around the stock of the rifle; Joe sees them in the sun, tight around a steering wheel and smeared with his blood. 

‘They would have come for me eventually,’ he says, dragging his eyes away from Nicky’s hands in favour of picking up his binoculars and pretending to check out the club across the street. ‘I would have been okay.’ 

The tiny twitch at the corner of Nicky’s mouth would have been invisible if Joe wasn’t bare inches away and utterly focused on him. It catches his attention immediately, and he watches it settle again into Nicky’s usual flat expression.

‘You would rather wait for _eventually_ than accept my help? The drill I saw not three feet from you suggests otherwise.’ 

That makes Joe turn his head. It’s not enough to see Nicky from the corner of his eye, he has to look him dead-on after a statement like that, the memory of that sound crawling up his spine again. Nicky looks surprised at himself, his mouth still slightly open. 

Joe has to actively remind himself that this man saved his life, and thus there is a chance he’s not as much of a dick as Joe has always believed him to be. Maybe.

‘I— I apologise,’ says Nicky, looking away from his scope at last. His grey eyes shine green where the sun catches the glass of the scope in front of him. His lip twitches, twisting ruefully for a second in the pause before he speaks again. ‘That was unnecessary.’

Joe nods slowly. Nicky has never apologised to him before, and he’s said far more cutting things. But, he supposes, they’ve never actually been such personal comments. Arguing with him about mission specs is hardly the same as reminding him of how close he came to being maimed and killed by a drill-wielding racist. Nicky’s jaw flexes again when he sees Joe nod, and he licks his lip in an almost nervous fashion before he turns back to his scope. 

Joe isn’t a betting man, usually, but he doesn’t think he’d lose if he bet on Nicky not seeing a damn thing through it. 

‘Why did you?’

Nicky glances at him, a quicksilver flash before he looks away again. Joe wants him to look at him properly, wants his complete attention, and it prickles under his skin.

‘Say it? I wasn’t thinking.’

Joe scoffs. ‘Don’t be obtuse, you know what I’m asking.’

There’s that slow blink again. Joe wonders if Nicky’s even aware he does it; if he knows how expressive his eyes are in his still and controlled face. 

‘It… it was the right thing to do,’ says Nicky, slowly, after an achingly long pause. ‘I knew I could help, so I did.’ 

He says it simply, like that’s the matter cleared up. He’s barely even touched the edges of their reality.

‘So compromising your mission, trashing your reputation, flying halfway across the world and storming the barricades single-handedly, you did that all because it was _the right thing to do_?’ Joe can’t help but slip into a mocking tone as he speaks. He knows he should be more grateful, but he doesn’t understand, there’s something here that he can’t grasp, and it frustrates him more than it should. Nicky’s shoulders tense again, and something like irritation thins the skin around his eyes. It satisfies something in Joe’s chest, that he’s finally fractured his control, even the tiniest bit.

‘Exactly.’ Turns out Nicky blinks slowly before he lies, too. 

Joe gives up any pretence of working. They’re hours out from when they really need to pay attention, the street is empty in the early morning light, and it’ll remain that way until the cleaning staff arrive to open the club. He drops his binoculars and rolls until he’s propped up on his hip and staring directly at Nicky. 

‘Bullshit.’ Nicky glances at him just long enough to raise an eyebrow. ‘That’s complete and utter bullshit and we both know it. Tell me why you came for me.’ Something that isn’t quite anger is stirring in Joe’s chest, growing with every second Nicky stays calm and collected. His knuckles are white with tension around his rifle.

‘Can’t you just be grateful that I did?’ Nicky’s voice is the crack of thunder in the air, not loud, but sharp. Finally, Joe’s broken through that even fucking tone. There’s annoyance lacing his words, twisting his accent and making it stronger. His lips are tight when he closes his mouth again, and Joe can’t look away. 

‘Why should I? Maybe you just wanted me to owe you something; a favour to call in later. Why should I thank someone for indebting me?’ Irritation makes him cruel in his words, his tone. He didn’t even know he was thinking such things until he said them, and now he can’t take them back. He doesn’t even believe them.

Nicky’s hands loosen around the barrel and stock of his rifle. He even, if Joe had to hazard a guess at his expression, looks hurt by the accusation, before he shutters his face completely, slipping back behind that stonewall Joe’s been colliding with since day one. If it wasn’t for the coiled tension of his body, he would think he’d lost all the ground he’d managed to gain in getting Nicky’s attention.

‘You give yourself too much credit.’ He bites the words out like each one costs him something. ‘What could I possibly need from you?’

‘You tell me.’ Joe hears the echo of Andy’s words in his own voice, even if Nicky doesn’t. Whatever she sees in this mess, Joe wants to see too. There are too many shadows and not enough light. 

‘I need _nothing_ from you.’ There’s anger in Nicky’s voice now, his whole body is tight as piano wire, on edge in a way that Joe can’t pin down. He leans in close to respond. He’s so close to Nicky that he slips out of focus, only his eyes are clear in Joe’s vision. They’re dark, and Joe wants to say it’s with the same anger that colours his tone, but he isn’t sure. They dart over his face like they’re searching for something, and whatever it is he's looking for, it isn’t his weak spots.

‘I don’t think that’s true.’ Joe's voice is a low whisper. It could almost be mistaken for _intimate_.

Nicky snarls something in quick and colloquial Italian, too fast for Joe to parse. He twists on the spot, his shoulders turning sharply away as he reaches up, and Joe only has time to widen his eyes before Nicky has him by the collar of his jacket. His hand is warm and heavy where it presses against his collarbone.

It feels like a circuit connecting when Nicky drags him into a hard kiss. A relief of pressure, to have his attention at last. 

Joe wants to be the kind of person who would push him away and demand an actual answer. Wants to be unselfish and mature and to finish what he started. He isn’t that person. He’s always found it easier to give in to passion than introspection. 

Instead of pushing Nicky away, he snarls back at him and finally bites at the tempting bow of Nicky’s lip. Nicky gasps under him and Joe licks into his mouth without a thought. He finally gets his hand back on Nicky’s waist and pushes at him until they’re tangled together. Nicky lets go of his shirt in favour of sliding his hand into his hair. It’s surprisingly gentle, especially given the way Nicky bites at his lower lip, but Joe can’t focus enough to wonder about it. They’re lucky they don’t knock the rifle out of position, and Nicky drags them further still until they’re clear of it completely, pressed up against the kit bag in the last clear edge of the nest. 

Joe has his fist clenched in Nicky’s hair, his other hand tight around his hip, and a thigh pressed hard between his legs. Every cutting comment and disdainful look Nicky’s ever given him sits at the forefront of his mind, and only fuels the fire that has him grinding down into the solid heat of him. Nicky’s thumb brushes the side of his neck, and the memory of him in the moonlight slips in too. Joe flicks his tongue behind Nicky’s teeth and Nicky whines against him.

Nicky gives as good as he gets, and there’s no end of sharp edges as they writhe together, biting and pulling and rolling against each other. There are no soft words, just smothered moans and a shared shuddering gasp as their hips finally align. 

Nicky slides a hand between them, and Joe bites hard into the join of his shoulder. Nicky trembles under him, but his hand is firm where he tugs at their belts; the backs of his knuckles drag down the length of Joe as he bares them both to the cold air, and Joe slides his hands up his ribs to see how much he can make him shake. 

Nicky blinks the same slow blink after he comes as he does when he laughs, and Joe feels that knowledge burn itself into his mind as he spills on Nicky’s bare stomach.

After, Joe's breath comes in gasps against Nicky’s neck; two inches from the vivid purple bruise he bit into the join of his shoulder. Nicky’s breath is slow and heavy where it brushes Joe’s curls, and his hands are soft where they rest against the small of his back. The room around them feels thick like the air after a storm. Something has passed through, and things have changed in its wake. Joe isn't quite sure what those changes are yet.

They clean up in silence. They settle back into their positions without another word. 

The room smells like sex around them, and Joe has none of the answers he was looking for, but he knows what Nicky’s skin tastes like now, and it feels like the answer to a question he isn’t ready to ask. 

The target arrives an hour early. They have work to do. For the rest of the op, they exchange only enough conversation to do their jobs. 

**Author's Note:**

> do you have thoughts? I'd love to hear them <3
> 
> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Catch me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/raedear_writes) and [tumblr](https://raedear.tumblr.com)


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